Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories:

Photography, Spectrality and Historical Fiction in Afterimage and Sixty Lights

Abstract

Sixty Lights and Afterimage use the trope of photography to explore the relationship between history, memory and fiction as modes of recollection. Employing a lexicon of haunting and spectrality, these novels are concerned with recognising the persistence of the past in a present cut off from linear models of inheritance and memory. Extending and elaborating influential theoretical models of contemporary historical fiction, these novels deploy the ghostly figure of photography in order to posit the persistence of the past as uncanny repetition and as embodied memory. The article closes by considering the implications of these historical fictions as “memory texts,” arguing that they are not, primarily, concerned with metafictional or metahistorical reflections but rather write the period into our cultural memory, offering themselves as the uncanny repetition of the “body” of Victorian culture persisting in the here and now